Manhattan Project: Australian physicist alerted Britain to US secrecy plan
cosmosmagazine.com
cosmosmagazine.com
Lookup the Acheson-Lilienthal Report in 1946. It's a fascinating "road not taken".
Making of the Atomic Bomb is amazing... but also bone chilling when you realize that scientists were basically advocating a dictatorship of technocrats.
The last 60 years have been a study in how to keep the forms of democracy while making a dictatorship of the billionaires.
The political system was even more run by the elites 60 years ago. For one example, we raise issues now that party insiders or elite-written election rules may somewhat distort the results of the primaries (and caucuses that are open to most party-registered voters, though they are more time consuming and for that reason exclusionary than primaries), 60 years ago we had the same partisan duopoly, without even a fig-leaf of meaningful primary elections, where caucused were much more limited in participation.
That we got the vote for blacks in the south isn't much of a win, from then on the poor blacks along with the poor whites have been disenfranchised through other means.
That we don't elect representative in smoke filled rooms doesn't mean much when the control has moved to selecting who gets to vote in the primaries [1].
[0] www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materials/Gilens%20and%20Page/Gilens%20and%20Page%202014-Testing%20Theories%203-7-14.pdf
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2016/04/19/politics/new-york-primary...
First, that would require a tremendous amount of data and an inherently biased framework of benefits valuation to support.
Second, you can't demonstrate the opposite, namely, that without the first happening, all others would have been better off. Sometimes wealth and structural freedoms benefit all participants, not to the detriment of the lower end, even when opportunity costs are included.
Not saying you are wrong, but your argument is.
In 1943 a British delegation led by James Chadwick (who discovered the neutron and won the 1935 Nobel Prize) went to work on the Manhattan Project, and included Oliphant, Peierls and Frisch, as well as Klaus Fuchs (who it turned out was a Soviet spy) and Tony Skyrme (more famous for his work on what later became known as 'skyrmions'), all from Birmingham, the Danish Physicist Neils Bohr (Nobel Prize winner in 1922) and Lord Cherwell who had invited Bohr to England and who was an advisor to Churchill and who advocated area bombings of Germany. The British techological 'Tube Alloys' programme was absorbed into the Manhattan project.
Bohr advocated sharing the technological developments with the Russians, and met both Churchill and Roosevelt in attempts to try and convince them of this. The British mission basically left with the passing of the Atomic Energy Act 1946 which prohibited the sharing of nuclear secrets with allies by the US government. It wasn't until a few years after the British developed their own nuclear warheads (the first being the Blue Danube) that cooperation on nuclear warhead technology began again in 1958.
Holden, however, reveals documents that indicate on one occasion he risked leaking information of such potential magnitude that the FBI might well have taken drastic action against him had he been discovered. Certainly, it imperilled the cooperative relationship between the two nations regarding weapons research – by revealing that the cooperation was, in fact, only going one way.
The researcher details a 1944 meeting at Berkeley, California, between Oliphant, Nobel laureate Ernest Lawrence and the military man in charge of the Manhattan Project, General Leslie Groves. At the fiery meeting, Groves – usually a very discreet operator – let it slip that there were some parts of the research that were not being shared with the British.
An imminent visit to Washington DC by one of Winston Churchill’s closest advisors, Lord Cherwell, was to be an exercise in misdirection. Further, Groves revealed, after the end of World War II the US intended to ensure that nuclear weapons manufacture and the storage of nuclear material would happen only in the central portions of North America.
Secretly appalled by this, Oliphant – Holden plausibly suggests – stopped work almost immediately and then travelled, perhaps for three days on a train, to the British embassy in Washington DC, and there sent a confidential memo to the British authorities, blowing the whistle on the US intentions.
Was putting nuclear weapons manufacture and storage in the central parts of the US part of keeping the technology secret?
And that applied to the knowledge as well. If Britain fell and the information on building a bomb fell into German hands, that was much worse than just Britain falling.
Great Britain's outrage is understandable.
Also, even if a situation ends, we'll always feel that it's decently probable it can happen again throughout our lifetimes. Ex: Anyone who lived through WWII is much more concerned (and rightfully so) that it could happen again.
The fact that Britain was nearly conquered in 1941 would be enough, with that bias considered.
>Also, even if a situation ends, we'll always feel that it's decently probable it can happen again throughout our lifetimes
Yes, and imagine how terrifying that scenario becomes if the enemy has nuclear weapons and you don't.
>The fact that Britain was nearly conquered in 1941 would be enough, with that bias considered.
Nearly conquered is a massive overstatement for a start. If you consider that too much of a risk to allow Britain to have nukes, the Business Plot was enough to forbid the US from having nukes.
Besides the implications for international cooperation there is a good argument to be made that this was to avoid as much as possible damage after a nuclear accident.
It was a slow divorce from the empire, but it was well advance pre WWII.
In some ways the relationship of Australia (and NZ) was similar to that of the countries of the EU. There was free movement of people (provided you were white) and free trade around the empire, but most people thought of themselves as citizens of their own countries.
That's not a British currency. The hint is in the name.